The job, again

[mmcnealy]

Yet another week of filling in for someone on vacation, this week its for J, who has decided to go camping. I never got to cross train with him because I was busy training with M and then filling in for her for the last two weeks. So I am pretty much flying blind with minimal instructions on how to fill in for him. Of course, Murphy’s law comes into play and everything that could possibly go wrong has and I have NO idea how to really fix things, I just play around with it until it works, sort of. It doesn’t help that most of his stuff is a black box and the whole IT infrastructure of the company is a spider web of XL spreadsheets and a few random Access databases. It is such a fricking nightmare.

Then, to top it off, my boss S calls me and asks me how the recon is coming. Recon of the x’s? Oh, yah. In the craziness that was last week she had asked me to finish up on a project that T, the (super smart) co-worker who was here for two months before she bailed for Microsoft (hence the super smartness), started. I was supposed to run it on the month end, but with all the crazy insanity that was Friday, it didn’t happen. So now I’m in the doghouse for forgetting that. Plus, now I can’t do it because she took away my permissions on a system that I need to run the report on. Oh, and on top of all that, the report has to be run after 3:30pm. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be an issue since I am here 8-5, but I am getting into the office at 6am everyday this week, so now it’s an extra long day today and on Friday. I hate 10 hour days, especially ones that start at 4:30 in the morning.

Oh, and then there’s this other project that I am ‘behind’ on. I am about ready to scream. She needs to pick her priorities. Either I am going to train and fill in for people on vacation, or I am going to do projects. Its kind of one thing or the other, hard to do both with all the manual labor that goes into every fricken report.

I really hate this job. There is nothing creative about it, except to figure out how to not to go insane during the day. I really think I am the wrong person for this position. I love the people, hate the work.

I realize that I need to learn the basics before I get to do the fun stuff. But the deeper I get into things the more depressed I get about the state of how bad things are and what an uphill climb its going to be to get any improvement made. Also, there doesn’t seem to be that much prospect of getting to do the fun stuff. I rather get the feeling that since I am the newbie, the icky scummy stuff is going to get dumped on me to do, freeing others up to do the fun stuff.